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vunderbayesterday at 8:44 PM6 repliesview on HN

If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.


Replies

rootusrootusyesterday at 10:23 PM

Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.

But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.

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chairmansteveyesterday at 11:05 PM

"This page is about 1 MB of assets".

And it could easily have been 10 KB.

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boudinyesterday at 8:51 PM

Closer to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s.

Although, being patient was part of the experience as well

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icedchaiyesterday at 9:39 PM

I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.

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joshuablaisyesterday at 8:53 PM

and 1MB is "small" for the modern web!

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alex1138yesterday at 9:33 PM

Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections

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